Work is an oily word in the vocabulary of the artist. ‘Artwork’ sounds like a parcelled commodity - it might even have a handle like a suitcase, easy to pick up wholesale - yet the telltale ‘work’ indicates the toil that precedes its’ appearance, fully formed, in the gallery. The term, then, is a somewhat cursory acknowledgement of a sculptures’ potentially arduous, and generally hidden, history.

Artists have long argued, though, that art is a matter of play rather than work - that it is its’ truancy from the offices of utility that defines it as art. In his essay ‘Homo Ludens’ (1938) the psychologist Johan Huizinga claims that play is of a higher order than seriousness, that the aim of play is within itself, and it is accompanied by ‘a feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness that it is different from ordinary life.’ Play, then, is hermetic and self-referential - rather like the Modernist artwork. Yet, in even the most mundane job, there is also a sense that ordinary life lays elsewhere, that work is extraordinary because it tends to be singular compared to life, which is so variform. Work and play, Huizinga suggests, are entirely alloyed; and oddly it is a hardcore work ethic that veers more towards play - pretence and reality come full circle to coalesce at a place of total immersion. Richard Forsters’ sculptural work and drawings seem to point towards this oxymoron, combining plays on form with hard-won fabrication. His installations perform dalliances with art history - the signature of a self-referential practice - while the materials doff their cap to past generations of grafters. Forsters’ roll call of materials include the perspex and neon of mercantile signage and the glossy objects of mass production, while his reference points are much more divergent, to the point of decadence even.

Throughout the work, materials gain and lose autonomy over the art-historical, cultural and social references they embody. Forster fluctuates between author and facilitator, in turn pressing MDF, resin or neon into service as conveyor of ideas... then allowing the materials free associative rein. Its’ rather like the novelists’ battle with a character as it starts to take on a life of its’ own... influencing its’ own fate. This clouding of the artists’ authorial role creates a pregnancy of meaning in the work that can seem evasive or double-edged or couched in some sort of formal back slang. Forster may well be withholding information or over-laying it in obfuscating veils; but always the robust sculptural physicality presents a face of conviction that overcomes any sense of distrust we may come to feel.

The column ‘Stack’ (2005) challenges us to decide whether it is a sculpture or a painting. From the ground upwards; large, layered pancakes of paint fade from visceral, bruised hues to tasteful pastel pinks and beiges. Forster describes this transition as the gradual lightening of shit and blood - a totem, perhaps, to the transgression between the corporeal and the aesthetic. Further convoluting this conundrum of media, genre and taste, the ‘Love’ series (2004) introduces historical figures into the frame. Three cast resin objects that look like precious, yellowing crumpled letters (set in protective casings) are dedications to past masters of formal relationships. The first one, ‘Love:So’ bears no markings other than the papers’ creases - a point of departure, or zero position at the start of the series. Within the creases of the second, ‘Love: Lost Love (After Canova)’, two embossed equilateral triangles can be discerned; one above the other and rotated slightly. In the third, ‘Love: Hey Louis K’, two triangles face one another in a point-to-point standoff. The progression between the three pieces is like a storyboarded choreography of partners, while the cultural references - the neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova and modernist architect Louis Kahn - import figurative and idealised takes on dualistic relationships. It is implied that the erotic sculpture of Canova and the proportions, apertures, sensuous light and humanism of Kahns’ architectural structures could both be distilled into similar schematic abstractions.

Much of Forsters’ work embodies his esoteric concerns in this way. Culture and history move through his work like gas through a fault line, permeating what may, at first, be taken for a purely formal exercise. His heterogeneous output, which includes drawing, crafted and outsourced objects, and installations; suggests an approach to making that is not led by ideas, but more a matrix of negotiations between thought and materiality. His graphite drawings, at first glance, appear a very different element of the practice. On closer reflection though, this collected body of small works on paper is not tangential to the larger sculpture. The subject-matter in the drawings often includes object-littered interiors, scenes that one can imagine Forster will eventually distill into some kind of sculptural edifice. It is as though by slowly internalising these images - a room full of computer terminals, showgirls at the Folies Bergere, a convolution of tree branches or a cluttered bookcase from a Brighton thrift store - Forster invites them to percolate through his personal art mythology and infect his work ethic... to re-emerge some other time in some other guise. The dedicated worker or committed player never overlooks an association, sensing the utility of just about anything.

Forster describes the studio as an intermediary space between the imagination and the gallery - a sort of decompression chamber in which ideas can be formulated and then exported. This, he says, is not an entirely satisfactory way to work, as each piece remains a prototype; a tentative proposal that awaits mass approval. To overcome this problem, he often works in response to a particular space, site or exhibition. At Cell Project Space in east London, that specificity is achieved by a progression from one room to the next, culminating in a formal seismic shift that is potentially vertiginous. In the second room, an already existing work, ‘Circles, Squares, Triangles (Therapy room)’ (2004), has been remade. In the third room, an element from the previous room, escapes and mutates into an abstraction that incorporates a formal reading of the phenomenology of the gallery architecture. The transformation is a filleting of sorts; a whole, three-dimensional structure loses its’ skeletal support and approaches the sliver-thin dimensions of an image.

‘Circles, Squares, Triangles (Therapy room)’ is arranged like a group therapy session, with chairs placed in a circle facing inwards. The chair, as a surrogate human figure, has a long history in sculpture, painting, video and dance. Here, poised in improbable conjoined pairs on stainless steel discs, they take on positively Baroque connotations of waltzers or theatrical grand finales. Such associations appear emphasised through the reflection of the image of the chairs in the highly-polished stainless steel, veiled as it is by a variety of floral patterns, crudely printed in grey to match the existing colour of the gallery floor. In salutation to Bruce Nauman, Forster has nestled a neon scribble under each pair of chairs - a recognition of Naumans’ cast negative space, his neon image/texts and the performativity of his work in general. The doubling up of Forsters’ chairs, meanwhile, remind us of the oh-so human concerns of the therapy room; relationship problems, self-consciousness to the point of duplicity, schizophrenic tendencies, fear of the doppelganger.... the double is trouble.

Creating an aesthetic level of schizophrenia, Forster counters these inward aspects of support and introspection with the hard-edged, high gloss of sculptural finishes, which are altogether more declamatory, showy and unsympathetic than the hush of therapy would usually imply. The final transition to the steel and neon ‘Bugs’(2006), in the third room, signals the ultimate renewal of the sickness of the therapy room into an aerated diagram. The neon appears to through a shadow of an emasculated chair onto the wall, transforming solidity and utility into a looming motif. Struts become objects that no longer support themselves but have instead struck up a new dependency on the walls of the gallery architecture. The evolution from utilitarian interior to autonomous formal proposition could be said to have reached an apotheosis - an immersive image that has swallowed its’ references whole.

Copyright Sally O’Reilly